was not an uncommon practice for the Scotch
universities at that period to sanction the absence of a professor on
a tutorial engagement. Adam Ferguson left England as tutor to Lord
Chesterfield while he was Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh,
and Dalzel resided at Oxford as tutor to Lord Maitland after he was
Professor of Greek in the same University. The Senate of Glasgow had
itself already permitted Professor John Anderson to remain another
winter in France with a son of the Primate of Ireland, when he was
chosen Professor of Oriental Languages in 1756, and Smith had
concurred in giving the permission. But Anderson's absence was absence
to fulfil an already-existing engagement, like the absence granted to
Smith himself in the first year of his own appointment, while Rouet's
was absence to fulfil a new one; and Smith, as his own subsequent
conduct shows, held pluralities and absenteeism of that sort to be a
wrong and mischievous subordination of the interest of the University
to the purely private interest or convenience of the professors. They
had too many temptations to accommodate one another by such
arrangements at the expense of the efficiency of the College; and his
action both in Rouet's case and his own is entirely in the spirit of
his criticism of the English universities in the _Wealth of Nations_.

FOOTNOTES:

[55] The words ladles and ladler seem to have descended from a time
when the exactions were made in kind by ladling the quantity out of
the sack.

[56] Hamilton's _Reid_, p. 43.

[57] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I. chap. ix.

[58] Muirhead's _Life of Watt_, p. 470.

[59] Duncan's _Notes and Documents_, p. 25.

[60] Burton, _Life of Hume_, ii. 59.

[61] _Wealth of Nations_, Book V. chap. i. art. iii.

[62] Stewart's _Works_, x. 49.

[63] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 16.

[64] See Doran's _Annals of the Stage_, ii. 377.

CHAPTER VII

AMONG GLASGOW FOLK

Smith was not only teacher in Glasgow, he was also learner, and the
conditions of time and place were most favourable, in many important
ways, for his instruction. Had he remained at Oxford, he would
probably never have been an economist; had he not spent so many of his
best years in Glasgow, he would never have been such an eminent one.
It was amid the thickening problems of the rising trade of the Clyde,
and the daily discussions they occasioned among the enterprising and
intelligent merchants of the town, that he gre